The Baku controversy and the decision of the FIA to issue a technical directive aimed at trying to limit the hopping of the single-seaters to a minimum, they inevitably brought back the question of porpoising at the center of the debate in Formula 1. Following the growing complaints from the drivers, who mostly called for an intervention by the International Federation motivated by safety reasons, something has moved on the eve of the Canadian GP. The plan, in the short term, is to introduce a mathematical formula that defines a tolerance range for the oscillations. Those who will be outside this limit will have to change their setup for safety reasons.
Among the teams, the team that pressed the most for an FIA intervention was the Mercedes. Initially, however, with this decidedly more rigid tolerance criterion, the silver arrows could be particularly penalized in terms of performance. Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, on the other hand, had been very critical of Mercedes, who had considered the complaints of Toto Wolff and his two drivers about the safety dangers posed by porpoising ‘opportunistic’. The 1997 world champion is also on the same line of thinking, Jacques Villeneuvewho interviewed by Gazzetta dello Sport contested the attitude of the eight-time world constructors champions.
“Mercedes is the team that pays the most for having to travel close to the ground. But they want to keep the car so low to force the FIA’s hand and change the rules – underlined Villeneuve – because when they lift it, the Mercedes is the one that loses the most. The pilots complain every second over the radio, saying “we are dying”. It’s a way to force the Federation’s hand. But it is a problem of design, not of rules. Nobody requires Mercedes to travel this close to the ground. There are teams like Ferrari that are strong despite the jolts. Red Bull doesn’t jump that much. It seems to me that I have returned to the era in which we played with tire pressure: it was very dangerous but everyone did it. Then every now and then they burst “the Canadian commented.
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